Visitor impressions from Strata: Hadoop is becoming necessary in the IT world

March 5th, 2013

The recent O'Reilly Strata conference offered an opportunity for industry professionals to gather and talk about the latest in Hadoop and big data advancements. As attendees reflect on big data trends and announcements from the event, several noted that Hadoop is being solidified as a must-have component of enterprise IT.

This belief is particularly strong following product announcements from companies such as Revolution Analytics and Microsoft, InformationWeek Executive Editor Doug Henschen noted. Microsoft's introduction of the Hortonworks Data Platform for Hadoop brings big data analytics to Windows, enables integration with Microsoft System Center and works with Microsoft's virtualization platform, making it the first distribution to run Hadoop on a virtualized infrastructure.

Examining these usability innovations, Forbes contributor and Neuralytix founder Ben Woo said that the takeaway from the conference is that Hadoop will soon be as fundamental a part of IT as Linux or Windows and that the information market will change as Hadoop file systems become commonplace.

"We all believe that the traditional enterprise data warehouse (EDW) will evolve from being relational to non-relational within five to 10 years," Woo wrote. "We all believe that the open-source nature of the Hadoop framework will drive cost down, and most importantly create new value and innovation in a very short time frame."

He added that many attendees were turning their focus to more business applications of Hadoop. Rather than just focusing on changes geared toward IT professionals, the next generation of Hadoop innovations is likely to be focused on transforming enterprises through big data initiatives.